Thanks everybody! Sorry for the slow responses today, I've been a bit busy, heh. But the tester build is now out to those folks.

thanks I won't be testing the pre release build for a reason I've already mentioned.but I am looking forward to testing it tomorrow if its anything stars testing period then it'll be a hell of lot of fun but what time are you releasing it tomorrow exactly? just because I won't be able to get in till the afternoon tomorrow.

I accidentally chose 10pm instead of 10am -- thanks for the catch. I've fixed that now.

Releases happen when the developer pushes the big green button. I could push the button now and it would override the timer. And when the timer counts all the way down, it will just sit at 0 until I press the button. This is all after Steam approves the game for release in general (which they did back in May).

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I accidentally chose 10pm instead of 10am -- thanks for the catch. I've fixed that now.

Releases happen when the developer pushes the big green button. I could push the button now and it would override the timer. And when the timer counts all the way down, it will just sit at 0 until I press the button. This is all after Steam approves the game for release in general (which they did back in May).

so steam let you choose when you want to release? to be honest I always assumed that was the case but its still nice to know.also sounds like ill be able to get straight in when it releases although Ill probably be to tired to test for longer than a couple of hours then.

Okay, some first observations. The graphics look very good. There is nothing I can point at and say "That's ugly". The level design is okay but I coem across a lot of closed doors. Entering doors in third person view is also a small challenge because in 9 of 10 times the door swings open in the wrong direction and pushes the raptor a little out of the way. because of the turn rate it's hard to aim for the door again and until then it is closed, repeating the circle. that happened so many times for me, I had to mention this. In general, the turn rate on the raptor and the ctonrols in general seem a little "clunky" in thrid person view. I know you wanted to add a realistically movememnt pattern for the raptor but the problem is, in narrow places it get's a bit tiresome navigating this way.I cannot tell abput first person view because nowhere int he controls I found the key to switch. Can you tell me what I have to press?

Level generation looks fine mostly but I come across some very big rooms with little to no decoration items. There was this big open space with staircases (I think this is a side street betwen two buildings? Hard to tell because the sky is darkened). The biggest problem weren't however the design but that tehre have been flying robots with no chance to hit them because were too far away from the staircases.Personally I like th eapartment sections a lot more than the warehouse sections or whatever they shall be. The apartment sections are probably the best part of the game, the feeling you have while moving through such familiar places is awesome. they are also the places with most varity I've seen.The destriuctible nature of every objet is a nice touch but do you have to use the same disambling behaviour on everything? I can understand this for chairs, paintings, doors and other stuff, but in the apartment you can find balls and tehy break apart like anything else. Please change this. What would be cool is, if you could act a realistic ball physic to the balls. they bounce of if you hit them with accelerating speed. If you hit to hard they "pop" (sorry, I don't know how to say this better in English, what I mean is that they loose their air, not really popping, a football rarely pops btu he can loose his air). I would actually enjoy kicking a ball around the game, thats some of the tiny stuff that people like to do.

Okay, now to real gameplay problematics. At some point I was seen by a robot that I never saw. i never foudn out where it was but it was alarmed and because of this I couldn't finish the game. It destroys the purpose of a stealth mechanic in my view. A suggestion would be, let robots stay alarmed but if you move out of sight you have an (to the player invisible) timer where the robot searches you. If he cannot find you, he returns to his usual behaviour and deactivates the shield again. I notice that you've added a lot of places with dead ends and I'm pretty sure these are meant as hiding places but they serve currently no purpose in my eyes. Robots do not roam between different room, actually I haven't seen robots moving at all unless provoked. Please add my idea and give this hiding places a purpose, I think it would be a cool idea.

Now performance. I noticed some lags but at one room it was unbearable. There was this big dark room in the apartment section that connected to different apartments. It had this mirroring pillar in the center and strong lights on the ceiling. Whenever I enter this place the game lags really hard.

2. Smash doors rather than having them just open, heh. They do open, but why let them?

3. The turn rate on the raptor is for the sake of navigation in small places, not for the sake of realism. On WASD it's impossible to control her if the turn rate is too high, because then you can only go cardinal and ordinal directions without turning the mouse. If the option for a turn rate adjustment slider is something you want, that would be a good thing to throw in mantis.

4. The alleys and a few of the other places are sparsely decorated at the moment, yes, because we're still getting more objects set up for them. In the case of one of the really giant rooms, you're meant to be facing a miniboss there, hence the extra room.

5. The cicadabots way up out of reach are by design. You don't have to fight them to get through the level.

6. There are not many fracture algorithms out there that can be run in realtime in particular. We're using voroni fracturing, which has to be run on a secondary thread as it is. Potentially we could get into softbody deformations with some things instead of them fracturing, but that strikes me as a very ancillary nice-to-have thing versus core gameplay additions. It would be nice, but I think that it has to come far later in the process if there's a lot of pickup of the game, because otherwise we lose the audience in the meantime.

7. Robots that are alerted are going to be on the minimap. That will make it so that you can find them.

8. I'm not a fan of timed search periods and giving up except in games where the searchers are infinitely generated (police in GTA). It's too easy to just go hide and sit around, which is really annoying. The other thing that would be absolutely game-breaking with that if robots ever gave up is that you just run to the end of the level past all the robots, and if you're fast enough you outpace them and they all give up and you win without ever fighting them.

9. The dead ends and whatnot are for tactical situations with robots that don't yet exist, and for places where there will be goodies to find.

10. Robots do not roam between chunks, but they do roam within rooms. For performance reasons, their AI and so on is disabled when you are not in the same chunk as them anymore. We have complex waypointing capabilities and other tools that we are not making good use of yet but that I spent a lot of time on. Having the ability to hide from robots in nooks and crannies is very much a design goal of mine. I particularly want to have some enemies designed around that. We have a ton of enemy designs that are not implemented yet.

11. Glad performance was okay in general. If you have a chance to take a picture of the one room that is so problematic, that would be appreciated. I have a feeling I know which one you're referring to, but I'm not positive. If you look in your PlayerData folder in your game folder, there is an InfoLog.txt file that should have the seed you were playing on. I could duplicate the issue from that, as well. It may be that it was not a problem with the room, but rather was causing too many chunks to be active at once because of the way raycasting currently activates them. I have a less-naive approach to raycasting that will cut down a lot on raycasts (which are presently about 40% of the non-graphics load) as well as being more accurate.

Cheers!Chris

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Thanks for the log! I should be able to repro that case in the morning.

And yep, while the game does feel quite mature in a lot of respects, it is still very much a work in progress in terms of what is and isn't there. It is, well, early access. Hopefully still fun though, and not giving anyone the impression of too-early-for-EA. The point was to deliver a baseline fun experience and then continue building that up into something that is hopefully truly great.

Incidentally, we're working with some folks on camera stuff, so that will also be better in the future with the third-person camera. There have been temporary difficulties with that, to my frustration. I'm under NDA on that one, so I can't say more (atypically).

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hey there so I finally got round to playing a little bit of it and well it ended up being stop motional(what I call when your frame rate goes down to low enough that the actions your inputting to do happen a fair after inputting them therefore making it like playing a stop motion movie) which I can generally cope with for testing purposes. (I had to put up with this when I used to play warframe) but not when the cameras going all over the place like thatso I decided take the bottom texts advice and actually look at the graphical settings and now its running at relatively workable rates although ill probably try it on my friendly neighbourhood pc(although I find this laptop being the best it is tends to get better performance than it) but any way now that's out of the way some general points.

1 what is this I see about a 4th mouse button in the key bindings? although I do REALY! appreciate being able to key bind screenshot taking since the idiot that designed the key workings on this laptop managed to make the screenshot function useless all over the place.

2 you may want to (in the future) put toltips off to the side for graphical options mainly because its handy to new players.

3 more out of general curiosity but what exactly is ,blend weight,? and why is its effects described in bones? its something that I've never ever heard of.

4 actual combat so far feels pretty good I encountered a suppressor turret who I bit to death(lol) after weaving to dodge his shotsand then a spidery thing which split it self of who I then also bit to death.will need to test a bit there but it appears that the kick attack isn't doing anything but that's probably because of the lack of hit confirm.

5 the raptor sounds adorable I know this isn't what you were going for but I LOVE it !.

I'm going to finish this off now before it turns into enougher wall of text.if your wondering why I didn't mention graphics its because I set everything so low in the quest for performance that its going to not look great regardless what ever happens.try not to take that personally its just that I usually have such a hard time getting 3d games to run well in general that I always do this first thing when I play 3d games for the first time.